Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to search results processing and more particularly to search results prioritization in a search engine.
Description of the Related Art
Content browsing refers to the retrieval and presentation of electronic content in a browser client. Content generally can include database records, electronic documents, messages, audio, audiovisual and video materials and imagery. Most commonly, content can be stored in a server environment and published for access by content consumers over a computer communications network such as the global Internet. Likewise, content can be stored in a database server environment and accessed through a query interface such as where the content is part of a data driven application. In either circumstance, content consumers generally retrieve content over the network by reference to one or more content identifying terms, or by reference to a network address for the content. Once retrieved, the content can be presented in a user interface.
Given the vast amount of content published for accessibility in a typical content distribution environment, one cannot enjoy an awareness of all possible content a priori so as to specify with particularity content of interest. Search engines fill the gap by providing an interface through which end users can instruct searches for content according to one or more search terms. Basic search engines permit simple term searches where the presence of one or more search terms in content result in the return of a reference to the located content. More sophisticated search engines permit boolean searching and even more sophisticated search engines allow for natural language searching.
Where search terms are provided in a search engine, the results are often presented dynamically as the end user keys in the different letters of one or more search terms and the dynamically produced results often reflect the relevance of a “hit” based upon a percentage of search terms present in the located content. Yet, in many cases, the search terms provided are not intended to be located in desired content. Rather, search engines frequently permit one to require the omission of any content containing a search term. In boolean terms, the NOT operation is permitted as well as the AND and OR operations. In any event, where the result list from a search is large, the returned document of greatest interest may be obscured from apparent view by the end user. Accordingly, prioritizing a list of search results to render first those search results of utmost interest can be of paramount importance.
Current methods for prioritizing the display of search results in a list of search results include providing advantage to documents which are more relevant to the query, documents which are updated recently, documents which are linked to by other documents often, and documents which are often selected in other similar searches. Some search engines do include the most recent content from particular feeds (like recent “Twitter(TM)” entries, related to a given query. While these methods go a long way in presenting the user desired content in most efficient form, these methods still leave a lot to be desired.